The present invention relates to a display, in particular, to an emissive display using organic electroluminescent (EL) devices.
The application of the organic EL devices to a plane type display is promoted, and it is proposed to realize an active matrix display with high brightness. As regards the driving system using a low temperature polysilicon thin film transistor(TFT), it is described in SID 99 Technical Digest, pp. 372–375.
In the pixel structure, a scan line, a signal line, an EL power supply line, and a capacitance reference voltage line are arranged to intersect with one another, and in order to drive the EL device, a holding circuit of a signal voltage is formed by an n-type scan TFT and a storage capacitor. The held signal voltage is applied to a gate of a p-channel type driving TFT, and controls a conductance of a main circuit of the driving TFT. The main circuit of the driving TFT and the organic EL device are connected in series from the EL power supply line and connected to an EL common line.
In driving this pixel, a pixel selection pulse is applied from the scan line, and the signal voltage is written to the storage capacitor through the scan TFT, and is held. The held signal voltage is applied as the gate voltage of the driving TFT, and controls a drain current, according to a conductance of the driving TFT determined by a source voltage supplied from the power supply line, and a drain voltage, and a driving current of the EL device is controlled, thereby controlling the display brightness.
However, in this system, there is a property in which even when the same signal voltage is applied in order to control the current, when the threshold value, and the on-resistance are varied, the driving current of the EL device is changed, and thus TFTs with less unevenness and having uniform characteristics are required.
As a transistor suitable for realizing such a driving circuit, there is a low temperature polysilicon TFT having a high mobility, using a user annealing process, and applicable to a large-type substrate. However, it is known that it has unevenness in the device characteristics, and when it is used as the organic EL device driving circuit, due to the unevenness of the TFT characteristics, even when the same signal voltage is applied, the unevenness in the brightness occurs in each pixel, and it has not been sufficient to display the gray scale with high precision.
Also, in JP-A-10-232649, as a driving method, the pixel is made to digitally and binary display the on/off state. As a result, since it is not necessary to use as the operating point, the neighbor of the threshold value at which the unevenness of the TFT characteristics reflects on the display significantly, there is a merit of reducing the unevenness of the brightness of the pixel. In order to obtain the gray scale display, one-frame time is divided into 8-subframes of different display times, and the average brightness is controlled by changing the light emission time.